When a student is invested, it means that they’ll retain much more information. They’re not simply memorizing facts that you tell them are important because they’re actively involved in what they’re learning.
Some students come to our classroom with an insatiable need to learn. They’re curious. They enjoy school. They always get ahead because they just can’t get enough of your class. (And they make you feel like a rockstar teacher every day!)
And then there’s the opposite: the student who is head-to-desk every time you turn around. There’s the student who does the bare minimum no matter how many times you call home in an attempt to get the parents on board.
But if our students see the value in what they’re learning, the ownership changes the outcome. Try these simple ways to help your students increase ownership in their learning.
- Let them choose. Giving your students a choice in what they learn helps them feel empowered. If students feel like they’re in control even a little bit, they’re more willing to put the effort into learning. Too often, we overthink it and make the choices much more difficult than they need to be. It doesn’t have to be something that takes extra time for you to create. Take a look at some of our favorites:
Tic-Tac-Toe
10 Cool Review Strategies
Careers in Science series - Help them interact with the content. Science is the perfect subject to create interactive learning objectives regularly. Make time for labs and experiments. Show demos at the front of the classroom if it’s too expensive to provide supplies for every single student. But whatever you do, don’t skip over the fun part of science! Need a little more incentive? Check out what this high school biology teacher learned when she made a change in her classroom.
- Allow for self-assessment. As teachers, we’re used to assigning grades to our students based on so many different pieces of the educational puzzle. But what if we flip the traditional method and help our students grade themselves? Many of our students don’t understand that providing incomplete answers is knocking their grade down. If they have to prove to you why they deserve a certain grade, they’re probably going to be inclined to work at a new level.
- Create an individualized environment. What works for student A won’t work for student B. Getting to know your students allows them to feel appreciated and empowered and then to produce their best work. If you think back to your own educational experiences, you can probably pinpoint a few teachers who invested into you and your level of learning was higher because of it.
- Solicit student feedback. If you create a simple survey at the end of the school year for students to complete on the course they just took, you just might be surprised at how authentic their answers are! Of course, you’ll get a few that ask for movies and pizza every day but many will give suggestions that will help your classroom run even more effectively in the future!
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LearnEd Notebooks provides teachers and students with an innovative notebooking solution. We specialize in providing educators with a unique curriculum that allows you to break free from conventional methods of instruction and spend more time on labs and inquiry-based science. We provide the framework of an interactive notebook with the flexibility of teaching strategies that seamlessly integrate with each teacher’s own methods of instruction. Our complete programs include printed student notebooks, digital presentations, and access to teacher resources — each focusing on diverse learning styles and engaging instructional strategies.
Click here to get LearnEd Notebooks in your classroom!
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